The One where you Can't Have Your Cake and Eat It!

 Let me explain to you the concept of the "work birthday"!


If, like me, you believe that everyone should have their birthday as their own private bank holiday then you always book the day off should it fall on a working day. Others like to come to work on their birthday. It's a personal choice.


So at our company we always have a "work birthday". Either the day itself or one nearest to the main event where you'd bring in cakes and savouries for everyone, your work mates decorate your desk with balloons, banners and bits of table confetti and presents are bestowed upon you. You take 10 minutes or so at the start of the day to open them, have a sneaky sausage roll before you offer them out to the baying hoards and are thoroughly spoilt by those you spend a vast proportion of your waking,working, week with!


This is to be no more!

Now we have changed departments, it has been decreed that this practice is too disruptive and not the most productive use of work time! Unless it is a milestone birthday, like a 21st or a 40th then we are not to decorate, congregate or celebrate! 

Now we could spend all day arguing the various merits of this. It does after all depend upon your point of view. Some people believe work is work and you are there to get on with your job. Others, like myself. like to break the routine up with something a little more social and informal. You get the best out of people with some give and take!

But this hasn't come from my boss, or my bosses boss but from a higher deity than even those two so it's not my place to argue however agrieved I feel about it.

However it's not all bad news we can still bring in cakes and food for the office to enjoy!

Oh can we! Funny that!

Well speaking as someone who has, for many years, brought in home baked cakes, cheese scones and sausage rolls on my birthday for the good and the greedy to clamour for I'm not feeling all that inclined to do it anymore.

Call me petty, call me churlish even but in this current , slightly mean spirited atmosphere, then when it comes to give and take it would seem that the fun has been taken yet we're till expected to give in the form of lightly whipped sponge, cream and jam.

I'll make a cake for my team to share but the days of being descendeded upon by those who barely know my name and only want me for my pastry when they won't even let me put up a few balloons for a special occasion are over. Infact hubby came up with a cracking idea to make individual muffins, marked with a name tag and only given out to the most deserving! I'm sorely tempted I can tell you.

It might be a lone and frankly pathetic stand but as another little bit of fun and individuality is sucked out of my working life it's my way of clinging onto my right to have a choice in what I do and who I give my time and care too.

Making someone a cake is an act of friendship and love. It shows time, emotion and thought. It's not just an excuse to scoff your face full at someone elses expense when you're not even allowed to share the full experience with those around you.

So it comes down to this.

From now on you can't always have your cake because I say who eats it!